Brian Stevenson
Just mercy is a fantastic book about the power of mercy and hope in the face of immense suffering and injustice. Brian Stevenson recounts his experience as a young Harvard law graduate trying to make an impact in the lives of people condemned to die by society for the crimes they did and didn’t commit.
I was moved by his commitment to a mission that most wouldn’t consider worthwhile to undertake. Why defend those who violated the social contract enough to have their right to life taken from them? Because, as Stevenson concludes, “Mercy is most empowering, liberating, and transformative when it is directed at the undeserving. The people who haven’t earned it, who haven’t even sought it, are the most meaningful recipients of our compassion.” And beyond saying this aphorism, Stevenson fills this books with humanizing stories of the paths that lead his recipients of his mercy to death row.
At one point, he recounts:
I frequently had difficult conversations with clients who were struggling and despairing over their situations – over the things they’d done, or had been done to them, that had led them to painful moments. Whenever things got really bad, and they were questioning the value of their lves, I would remind them that each of us is more than the worst things we’ve ever done. I told them that if someone tells a lie, that person is not just a liar. If you take something that doesn’t belong to you, you are not just a thief. Even if you kill someone, you’re not just a killer. I told myself that evening what I had been telling my clients for years. I am more than broken. In fact, there is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things you can’t otherwise see; you hear things you can’t otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us.
It’s an interesting concept. We are more than our actions, we have value beyond what we can do or have done. Accepting that is difficult because it’s easy to recognize the humanity in someone who has a character that we can applaud, but it’s not so easy to do that when the person behind the eyes we’re looking into seems to be less than human. It’s the paradox present in the whole book: those who really need and can benefit the most from mercy are those who seem to deserve it the least.
Yet Stevenson forces us to confront our own biases and recognize the humanity of the marginalized. Recounting tragedy after tragedy, he paints a portrait of a system that unfairly put(s) people on death row, and the lives that his “clients” lead to get where they were. Each story felt like it’s own tragedy, but sown together by the mission of a man seeking to save those people, they shed light on a system that was totally broken. The only way to fix it, is to recognize that we are all broken, and move on.